Gurung & Duong (1999) compiled a study relating to mixed-ethnic relationships ("MER"s) and same-ethnic relationships ("SER"s), concluding that individuals part of "MER"s generally do not view themselves differently from same-ethnic couples.In Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem (1948), Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal ranked the social areas where restrictions were imposed on the freedom of Black Americans by Southern White Americans through racial segregation, from the least to the most important: basic public facility access, social equality, jobs, courts and police, politics and marriage.These statistics do not take into account the mixing of ancestries within the same "race"; e.g.

White wife/Black husband marriages are twice as likely to divorce by the 10th year of marriage compared to White/White couples, while White wife/Asian husband marriages are 59% more likely to end in divorce compared to White/White unions.Likewise, since Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity, Hispanic marriages with non-Hispanics are not registered as interracial if both partners are of the same race (i.e.a Black Hispanic marrying a non-Hispanic Black partner).Virginia, but also continues to represent an absolute minority among the total number of wed couples.According to the United States Census Bureau, the number of interracially married couples has increased from 310,000 in 1970 to 651,000 in 1980, to 964,000 in 1990, to 1,464,000 in 2000 and to 2,340,000 in 2008; accounting for 0.7%, 1.3%, 1.8%, 2.6% and 3.9% of the total number of married couples in those years, respectively.The table shows that among whites who out-married in 2008, there were different patterns by gender in the race of their spouses.More than a quarter of white men (26.9%) married an Asian woman, and about 6.9% married a black woman.Interracial marriage in the United States has been legal in all U. states since the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v.Virginia that deemed "anti-miscegenation" laws unconstitutional. The proportion of interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages has been increasing since, such that 15.1% of all new marriages in the United States were interracial marriages by 2010 compared to a low single-digit percentage in the mid 20th century.The study also observed a clear gender divide in racial preference with regards to marriage: Women of all the races which were studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race for marriage, with the caveat that East Asian women only discriminated against Black and Hispanic men, and not against White men.Several studies have found that a factor which significantly affects an individual's choices with regards to marriage is socio-economic status ("SES")—the measure of a person's income, education, social class, profession, etc.